The Oldest Everything: Searching for the Oldest Thing in the Universe

Follow the Science

What’s the world’s oldest surviving building? Language? Useful technology? The oldest living organism? The oldest species of living organism? The oldest rock on the planet and the oldest star in the cosmos? How do scientists measure the ages of ancient things?

In this podcast series, “The Oldest Everything”, I’ll go in search of the oldest things in the world, and along the way I’ll explore the physics of time’s passage, which is tied up with the concept of entropy, itself intertwined with the process of aging. I’ll explore the notion of endurance and what parts of our present world will be left standing in the far future.

In this pilot episode, I’ll be turning my attention to the universe – which is getting a lot of attention lately for amazing new discoveries, most recently that the whole cosmos is rippling with gravitational waves.

Those waves may be the weirdest thing in the universe, but what’s the very oldest thing in the universe? Is it something all around us, or something many light years away?

I’ll be hearing from four science superstars – Richard Gott, Sabine Hossenfelder, Hakeem Oluseye, and Nobel Laureate James Peebles.

Writer, Host, Producer: Faye Flam

Editor: Seth Gliksman

Music:

"Through The Wormhole" by Dilating Times is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

"Jam No. 1" by Dilating Times is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).